Ensode Technology, LLC

In my recent article, A glimpse at Java EE’s future, I stated that "Java EE 9 may do away with the concept of application servers completely". This generated some interest on Twitter.

Background - Project Jigsaw and Java Modularity

Some background for those not in the loop, Java 9 will introduce Project Jigsaw, which will bring modularity to the Java platform. Java has been around for some 21 years or so, the JDK includes libraries that are not used a whole lot anymore, for example, libraries to support CORBA, which was popular in the mid to late 90's but is seldom used anymore. However, the JDK team at Oracle is hesitant to remove these libraries because doing so would potentially break compatibility with existing applications that may be using them, therefore newer JDK's need to keep including these old libraries.

Project Jigsaw provides a solution to this problem, instead of including everything in the JDK, from Java 9 and beyond, the JDK will become modular. Applications will use only the modules that they use. Going back to our CORBA example, the few applications out there still using CORBA won't break, but all other applications not using CORBA won't have this unused library lying around. Project Jigsaw will work similarly to the way Maven handles dependencies today, however this functionality will be build right in the JDK.

Project Jigsaw won't be limited to eliminating "cruft" from modern versions of Java, in general, any dependencies an application may have could be declared as a module. Library authors may publish their libraries as modules, which will then be downloaded by any applications that require them at compile time when the application is built.

Modular Java EE

I had the opportunity to attend a Birds of a Feather session titled "Enterprise Java for the Cloud" during JavaOne 2016. During this session is when I heard that there is a possibility that Java EE 9 may do away with the concept of application servers, in favor of Java 9 modules. A very interesting concept and quite a change from the way we have been developing enterprise Java applications since J2EE was released back in 1999. Great news for application developers, but, should application server vendors be worried?

The answer is a resounding no. The way this would work is that vendors would provide their Java EE APIs as modules, then applications would include them as dependencies. Potentially, this could even benefit application server vendors, let me explain.

As most of you reading this blog probably know, Java EE is a series of specifications, with multiple implementations. For example, Hibernate, EclipseLink and OpenJPA are all implementations of the JPA specification. Similarly, Weld and OpenWebBeans are implementations of the CDI specification. Each application server ships with one implementation of each Java EE specification. As application developers, we are more or less stuck with the implementation that the application server vendor provides (there are ways around this, but they require jumping through hoops). If Java EE 9 adopts the modularity features of Java 9, then we as application developers may be able to pick and choose Java EE API implementations as we please, for example, we could use Hibernate as our JPA implementation, and OpenWebBeans as our CDI implementation (as far as I know, no application server currently provides this combination of CDI and JPA implementations). We as application developers benefit by picking our favorite implementations of each API, and vendors benefit by an increased pool of potential users for their Java EE API implementations.

Yesterday was day 3 of JavaOne 2016. Oracle and the Java community is planning new features for the upcoming Java EE 8. I've been attending as many Java EE related sessions as I can, to see what the current plans are. All the speakers have made a point to state that nothing is carved in stone, all of this may change as it is still in planning stages.

I started the day attending "Cloud Native Java EE", a tutorial by Payara engineers Mike Croft (@croft) and Ondrej Mihályi (@OMihalyi). The talk was very good and explained how to deploy Java EE applications to the cloud using Payara Micro.

I then headed over to Antoine Sabot-Durand's (@antoine_sd) session on CDI 2.0. Antoine is the CDI spec lead and obviously knows his stuff. He covered several new features coming to CDI 2.0 such as support for Java SE, asynchronous events, and the ability to add interceptors at runtime to CDI beans. That last one I thought was very impressive, I hadn't ever imagined that would even be possible.

Next I went to a JAX-RS 2.1 session by Ed Burns (@edburns) and Pavel Bucek (@pavel_bucek). The session covered several new JAX-RS features such as non-blocking I/O, server sent events and a reactive client API.

After that I attended "Portable Cloud Applications with Java EE" by Rajiv Mordani, Joe Dipol, Josh Dorr. This session covered how Java EE 9 will standardize the ability to deploy Java EE applications to different cloud providers.

The next session I attended was on Servlet 4.0, delivered by Ed Burns (@edburns), discussing new features of this new version of the Servlet specification. This session started with a brief overview of network programming, Ed took some of us old timers in a trip down memory lane, mentioning things like CGI and Gopher. Of particular interest in this session was Servlet 4.0 support for the HTTP/2 protocol. Ed was very good at explaining how this new version of HTTP addresses several limitations of the current HTTP 1.1 protocol supported by most browsers.

The last session I attended was "Security for Java EE 8 and the Cloud", by Kk Sriramadhesikan. The session covered security challenges posed by cloud environments and how the Java EE spec plans to address it. The new version of the Java EE Security API aims to make it easy for application developers to secure their cloud applications, leaving the details to security experts.

As evidenced by all of these great sessions, major changes are coming to Java EE in the not so distant future, looks like we will have some exciting times ahead.

This morning I attended Gaurav Gupta's JPA Modeler session, the tool is certainly very impressive and I wanted to learn more about it.

After Gaurav's session, I headed to the Franciscan C/D room to prepare for my own Hands-On Lab, "Java EE, Beyond the Basics". I had some materials (slides, manual, code samples, etc) to copy to the virtual machine's on the laptops and Murphy reared his ugly head. The lab's virtual machines were not booting. I googled the error and learned that as a workaround I had to disable USB on the VMs. With the help of a couple of technicians, we disabled USB on each and every virtual. But I had the files I needed to copy on a thumb drive, how could I copy them with USB disabled? Luckily, I had the files online, therefore we were able to download them and copy them to each and every VM. By the way, all class materials can be downloaded here. Luckily we were able to finish on time, by the time the students showed up the VM's were ready to go.

The session went very well, I covered JSF and EJB, my co-speaker Bob Larsen covered CDI. We were planning to cover JAX-RS as well, but unfortunately we ran out of time. I got some good feedback from the students both face to face and over Twitter, I think the session was well received.

After my session, I attended Linda DeMichiel's session on Java EE 8 Update. Linda, for those that don't know her, is one of the specification leads for the Java EE platform. She covered current plans for Java EE 8, currently scheduled to ship sometime in 2017. A controversial proposal is to drop the MVC API from Java EE 7, as well as JMS 2.1 (JMS 2.0, the current version, would be delivered with Java EE instead).

I then attended "Enterprise Java for the Cloud" by Rajiv Mordani, Josh Dorr and Dhiraj Mutreja. This session was about what is planned for Java EE 9. Againn lots of speculation here, as everything is in early planning stages. One thing that I found interesting is the addition of a standard Java EE API for NoSQL databases, at this moment it is not clear if it will be a completely new API or an enhancement to JPA.

The next session I attended was on JSON-B, the new Java API for JSON Binding. This is a new API scheduled to be included with Java EE 7, this new API will populate Java objects from JSON strings, and vice-versa.

I then skipped the JCP party to attend the "Java EE for the Cloud" Birds of a feather (BOF) session. This BOF session was surprisingly well attended, it started at 7:00 pm, usually night sessions are not that well attended, they compete with parties and with tired, jet-lagged attendees, looks like many people, like myself, care deeply about the future of Java EE. There were very good questions in this session, for example, there is a new security API proposed for Java EE 7, one of the attendees asked about integrating applications using the existing security APIs with the new proposed Java EE 8 API. In this session the comment was made that, although speculation at this time, it is possible that Java EE 9 will do away with the concept of application servers, in favor of Java 9 modules.

There are lots of sessions on Java EE 8 and Java EE 9 during the conference, I will do my best to attend as many as I can, to try and pick the brains of the individuals working on the new specifications for these future Java EE versions.

Day one of JavaOne 2016 is in the books. Day 1 is typically JavaOne's NetBeans Day, and this year was no exception. Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend several sessions showcasing NetBeans capabilities, I saw features present in the current version of NetBeans, some features are available in the upcoming NetBeans 8.2, others, Java 9 features specifically, will be available in a future version of NetBeans, but you can start experimenting with them today by downloading the NetBeans Java 9 build.

In no particular order, here are some of the coolest things I saw yesterday on day one of JavaOne 2016.

Adding new refactoring capabilities to NetBeans on the fly.Michael Nascimento Santos (@mr__m) demoed how to add refactoring capabilities to NetBeans on the fly with Project Jackpot. The specific example he showed was to add the capability for NetBeans to provide warnings when using Joda-Time, and suggest that the code use Java 8's Date/Time API instead. Java 8, for those that don't know, introduced an improved Date / Time API which is much nicer than was what available with Java in earlier versions. Before Java 8, your best bet when working with dates was to use the Joda-Time library. You can see a video of Michael's demo here.

Create complete Java EE applications with JPA Modeler.Gaurav Gupta (@jGauravGupta) demonstrated a very cool NetBeans plugin called JPA Modeler. JPA Modeler can generate database tables, JPA artifacts (entities, DAO's etc), and even complete Java EE applications just from a database model. The tool works like those graphical applications that DBA's use to create the database (i.e things like ERWin), but goes beyond the capabilities of these tools by generating a scaffold of your Java EE application. Gaurav is JPA Modelers project lead.

NetBeans JShell IntegrationJShell is a new upcoming feature of Java 9, it allows to write "low ceremony Java", which means, to develop a "Hello World" program, you would just have to type System.out.println("Hello, World"), instead of having to declare a class, create a main() method, etc. The NetBeans Java 9 build includes built-in support for JShell, you can open a JShell window from NetBeans, experiment with your Java code, then automatically create a Java class with your JShell code snippets. Geertjan Wielenga (@GeertjanW) demoed all this, it was jaw droppingly cool. You can read a blog post explaining NetBeans JShell integration in Geertjan's blog.

I delivered the same talk last year, it was so popular that this year we're scheduled to deliver it twice, both sessions are completely packed. I'll be delivering the same talk tomorrow morning at 8:30 am in the Hilton Franciscan B/C/D room.

The session is actually based on a week-long class I taught for one of my clients. The JavaOne version is compressed to fit in a 2 hour session. I'll be happy to teach the full course for anyone that would like to get more in-depth training, contact me at dheffelfinger at ensode dot com for details, my Java EE with GlassFish and Java EE with NetBeans books also contain additional material.

Some of the students requested a copy of the materials, and I'm happy to oblige. Click here to download a zip file containing all the materials, including the slides, exercise manual, source code for the demo and exercise solutions.

I just came back from my annual trip to JavaOne. As usual, the conference was great. This year I had two talks, I participated in a panel at NetBeans day on Sunday right after the Technical Keynote. The title of the session was "Get Productive with Free Java Tools". I had the pleasure of presenting with Tony Epple (@monacotony), who was moderating the panel and gave a quick demo on DukeScript, Sven Reimers (@SvenNB), who showed how to integrate the NetBeans IDE with JavaFX's SceneBuilder, Michelle Chamberlin, who explained the cool things she is doing at Boeing with the NetBeans platform, and Bernd Ruehlicke, who presented how the NetBeans platform is being used in the oil industry.

My other session was a Java EE Hands-On Lab I co-presented with Mark Heckler (@MkHeck). Many thanks to Josh Juneau (@javajuneau), Sven Reimers (@SvenNB) and Bob Larsen, who helped us proctor the lab. The session was packed to the brim, there was a waiting list and many couldn't make it inside.

Feedback for the Hands-On Lab was great, attendees were stopping me in the hallway to tell me how much they enjoyed it, made my day. If you were one of those who couldn't make it in, or if you couldn't make it to the conference, all the materials for the lab can be found at http://ensode.net/downloads/JavaEE_Hands_On_Lab.zip.

In addition to my own sessions, I attended several sessions by some of the other great speakers. Sunday morning I attended the GlassFish community panel, with John Clingan (@jclingan), Cameron Purdy (@cpurdy) and Anil Gaur (@annilgaur), moderated by Reza Rahman (@reza_rahman), in this session, the panelists reiterated Oracle's commitment to GlassFish.

During the GlassFish Adoption session Mohamed Taman (@_tamanm) talked about a large scale deployment in Egypt, in which he used GlassFish on a UN project. His company won the contract, and by the time they started to work on it most of the work was already in place, readily impressing his client. Mohammed also briefly talked about this project during the community keynote. Martin Mares (@MartinJMares) also talked during this session, showing some cool things he is doing with the GlassFish command line administration tool, asadmin.

I then attended the technical keynote, which included speakers from IBM and Oracle. The keynote was running behind schedule, I had to leave early since I had a session right after, as I'm sure you've heard by now, Brian Goetz (@BrianGoetz) was kicked out of the stage towards the end. I missed when it happened live, but I plan to watch the recording.

Later on Sunday I attended a session on using NetBeans for teaching, with Ken Fogel (@omniprof), Johannes Weigend (@JohannesWeigend), Paul Anderson (@Paul_ASGTeach), Gail Anderson (@gail_asgteach), Zoran Severac (@neuroph) and Andreas Stefik (@AndreasStefik). In addition to my daytime job as a Java EE software developer, I sometimes teach short courses on Java EE using NetBeans, I picked some good tips from this session that I'm sure to use in future courses.

John Ament (@JohnAment) gave a talk on Monday morning about building RESTful web services outside an application server.

On Monday, there were many sessions about the future of Java EE, Linda DeMichiel had a very interesting presentation about the future of the platform as a whole. Pavel Bucek (@pavel_bucek) had a session about the future of the Java API for WebSocket. Martin Grebac (@mgrebac) had a session on the JSONB specification that is slated to be included in Java EE 8.

Geertjan Wielenga (@GeertjanW) and JB Brock (@peppertech) had a great
session on Monday about Coding for Desktop and Mobile with HTML5 and Java EE 7. In
this session they showed the NetBeans / Chrome integration, in which
changes to the markup in NetBeans result in an instant refresh on the
browser, greatly speeding up web application development, very
impressive.

On Monday night I attended a couple of GlassFish Birds-of-a-Feather
(BOF) sessions. The first GlassFish BOF was the GlassFish Community BOF
and was led by John Clingan (@jclingan), I had the pleasure of meeting
Manfred Riem @mriem, JSF and MVC co-spec lead during this BOF. The
second GlassFish BOF was about contributing to GlassFish, it was led by
Reza Rahman (@reza_rahman), GlassFish and Java EE evengelist at Oracle,
and Steve Millidge. Steve is the CEO
of C2B2 consulting, a consulting firm in the UK, and is
also the man behind Payara, a new supported distribution of GlassFish,
if you are using GlassFish for your Java EE project, you should check Payara out.

I also attended a JSF BOF on Monday night, in which
Kito Mann (@kito99) and another JSF expert group member explained their
ideas for future features in JSF.

On Tuesday, Arun Gupta (@arungupta) had an interesting talk about
lessons learned in real-life Java EE 7 projects. In this session he
described several Java EE 7 already in production, including Mohamed
Taman's project that was featured in the technical keynote on Sunday.

Also on Tuesday, David Delabassee (@delabassee) had a very interesting talk about
implementing home automation with JavaEE. He was actually controlling
the lights in his home office in Belgium live from the session, which
was being held in San Francisco, very cool stuff.

Tuesday night there was a BOF on meeting with the Java EE specification leads with Bill Shannon, Linda DeMichiel, Ed Burns (@edburns), Manfried Riem (@mriem), Pavel Bucek (@pavel_bucek), and all other Java EE specification leads. It is always an honor to be in the same room with those to work so hard to bring us the latest Java EE specs.

Josh Juneau (@javajuneau) had a session Wednesday afternoon about Concurrency Utilities for Java EE, a new API that was introduced in Java EE 7.

On Thursday morning I attended the community keynote, it started with Michael Greene from Intel, we saw some of the stuff that Intel is doing with Java on the server side, also, there was an announcement about Intel joining the OpenJDK project. During the community keynote, there was a lot of very interesting coverage about Java powered robots, including automated cars from Perrone Robotics, a company based in Charlottesville, Virginia, not too far from my neck of the woods. There were several community members on stage at one point or another. The community keynote wrapped up with no other than James Gosling, the father of the Java language, talking about how Java has come full circle, it started as an "Internet of Things" language, and is currently used more and more in that realm.

An annual tradition during JavaOne keynotes is that at one point or another, they start throwing t-shirts at the audience. This year there was a twist, they were using a rubber catapult contraption to be able to throw t-shirts to members of the audience that are sitting farther back (side note, Sven Reimers, which was sitting two seats away from me, got hit in the face with one of these t-shirts thrown using the contraption, Sven, if you are reading this, I hope you are ok, but that was very funny). Every year I try very hard to catch one of these t-shirts, to no avail, this year, I finally was able to catch one.

On Thursday right after the community keynote there was a very
interesting Java EE 8 community panel, with representatives from all
major Java EE application servers, including [dude's name] from IBM,
Mark Little [twitter] from Red Hat, David Blevins (@dblevins) from Tomee
[spelling], Cameron Purdy representing GlassFish, John Clingan
(@jclingan) representing the Avatar project. And Adam Bien representing
himself as a member of the Java EE community.

Also on Thursday, Adam Bien (@abien) had a cool session about using Nashorn, the JavaScript implementation included in the Java Development Kit (JDK) 8, in Java EE applications. Adam is a great speaker, make sure you check his AirHacks online seminars.

I tend to focus on Java EE sessions when I go to JavaOne, but this year I went to a couple of sessions covering other very cool stuff. Tony Epple (@monacotony) and Jaroslav Tulach (@JaroslavTulach) had a very funny and informative session about DukeScript, DukeScript applications are plain Java applications that internally use HTML5 technologies and JavaScript for rendering.

Baruch Sadogursky and Yoav Landman , another great comedic duo, had a great session on Groovy puzzlers.

Venkat Subramaniam (@venkat_s) delivered a fast paced, humorous and interesting talk on Groovy closures, this was late in the day on Thursday, a great way to end the conference.

A major part of the conference is the vendor's booths. This year I dropped by the Tomitribe booth, Tomitribe provides support for the Apache TomEE application server. I also visited the CodeName One booth, these guys make a product that allows you to develop applications in Java for both Android and Mac OS. I also dropped by the IDR solutions booth, this company makes a product that converts PDF documents to HTML5, and the Payara booth, who provides technical support for GlassFish.

Wednesday afternoon I had a book signing at the JavaOne bookstore, my first time signing books at JavaOne, great experience.

In addition to sessions, booths and book signings, JavaOne always has plenty of social activities. This year I attended the NetBeans party on Saturday night, the Java EE community appreciation event on Sunday night, and the JCP party on Monday night. I also attended the Oracle appreciation event, this year they had none other than Aerosmith playing at the event.

As always, JavaOne was awesome, great sessions, great social activities and above all the opportunity to rub shoulders with the greatest minds in the Java community. Every year I meet new great people from all over the world, and even though I don't see them often, when I run to them at the conference it is always as if I'm meeting with old friends.

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of the Java language, I'm sure JavaOne 2015 will be out of this world, I can't wait.

The course lasted two days, and it covered the most commonly used Java EE technologies and API's such as JavaServer Faces (JSF), Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), the Java Persistence API and the Java Message Service(JMS). The course also touched on Bean Validation and the Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS).

The students were veteran Java developers and architects, ranging from around 5 to 18 years of experience. There were a few students that had use EJB's back in the J2EE era, some that had used earlier versions of JSF (1.x) and some that had been focusing on Spring for their server side Java development.

None of the students had use modern versions of EJB or JSF, they were very impressed on how much easier modern versions of these frameworks are compared to their Java EE counterparts.

Since we had only two days, we only covered the basics of each technology, such as Facelets markup for JSF. For CDI, we covered context (scope) annotations and dependency injection for CDI. We mentioned additional CDI features such as qualifiers, stereotypes and interceptor binding types.

The different Bean Validation annotations were covered, pointing out how simple it is to do validation using just a few simple annotations. As far as EJB's go, I covered the different type of session beans, such as Stateless, Stateful, and Singleton session beans; as well as Message driven beans. For EJB's we went a bit deeper, covering things such as transaction management, interceptors for Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and the EJB timer service.

When talking about JPA, the class covered basic JPA annotations such as @Table and @Column, as well as one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many and one-to-one entity relationships. We also covered eager vs lazy fetching, and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. We ended the JPA topic with a discussion of the Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL) and the JPA Criteria API.

I overheard some comments from the students, for example, one mentioned "EJB's are cool", which I completely agree. Another student noted that there isn't anything in Java EE that he cannot accomplish with Spring, which, while it may be true that the end result is the same, fails to take into account that the amount of work to get this end result tends to be a lot less with Java EE.

There were hands-on labs for the students to practice the concepts taught in class. I chose NetBeans as the IDE for the exercises, since it comes bundled out of the box with everything needed to build complete applications, such as a Java EE compliant application server (GlassFish), and a fully functional RDBMS (JavaDB). Not many of the students had previous NetBeans experience, however most of them were able to finish the exercises (which were simple, but complete Java EE applications) in about 30 minutes or so.

While discussing the hands-on labs, I provided some NetBeans tips, such as the ability to generate boilerplate code (Alt-Ins), generate JPA entities from an existing database, and the NetBeans JPQL editor, which provides code completion when developing JPQL queries.

All in all, a great experience. I don't get to teach as often as I'd like, it is a nice change of pace from my day to day job developing real-life Java EE applications.

Assuming you already have some Java experience, as well as some HTML experience, there is nothing to JSF, you can learn the basics in a few minutes. I also assume that you are familiar with packaging and deploying Java code to an application server such as GlassFish, WildFly, JBoss, Weblogic or Websphere, or to a servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty.

JSF has evolved over the years, this blog post covers the best practices in JSF 2.0 or newer, specifically, Facelets is used to develop the front end (as opposed to JSP) and CDI Named beans are used to develop the server side code (as opposed to managed beans).

Step 1: Develop Java class(es) that will hold information (the Model in the MVC pattern)

Your Java class will be a Plain Old Java Object (POJO), it will consist of private properties public setters and getters.

The @Named annotation designates the class as a CDI managed bean, gives it a name, which by default is the class name with its first character switched to lowercase (“person”, in our case). This annotation allows JSF pages to access our Java class.

The @RequestScoped annotation gives our CDI bean a scope of request. If you have developed web applications in Java before you should be familiar with bean scopes by now.

The following table shows the most commonly used scopes for CDI named beans:

Annotation

Scope

@RequestScoped

Request

@SessionScoped

Session

@ApplicationScoped

Application

@ConversationScoped

Conversation

@FlowScoped

Flow

@Dependent

Dependent pseudo scope

The first three should be self-explanatory, the last two (@ConversationScoped and @FlowScoped) are both meant for the bean to live throughout two or more requests, but not last through the whole session. Since we're in a hurry, I can't explain these in detail, but suffice to say that @FlowScoped was introduced in JSF 2.2 as part of Java EE 7 and is the preferred way to achieve this functionality if you are using JSF 2.2 or newer. @Dependent just means that the bean will be created as needed.

Step 2: Develop a controller class

This is the controller in the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. As far as plumbing, there is not much to do for controllers, just use the @Named annotation and an appropriate annotation.package com.ensode.jsfinahurry.controller;

//in a real application, we would process user-input here //more than likely saving data to a database

return "confirmation"; }}

Our JSF pages will invoke the processData() method when the user clicks on a button, via a method binding expression (next section). By convention, the next page to render in the browser will match the return value of the invoked method (processData(), in our case). For our example, we will develop a page named confirmation.xhtml (matching the return value of “confirmation”) that will be rendered after our processData() method is invoked.Step 3: Develop the pagesNow that we have our Java code in place, we need to develop the user interface. JSF pages are developed using Facelets, a JSF specific view technology. Facelets pages are nothing but standard XHTML pages using some JSF specific name pages.A page used to allow the user to enter person data (to be stored in our Person class) may look like this:

If you know even basic HTML, you should have a pretty good idea of how the above Facelets markup works. Before explaining the markup, notice that most JSF specific tags on the page have an id attribute. This attribute is optional, but it is a good idea to set it, for starters, it allows us to link labels to input fields (explained below), but also, when things don't work as expected it is much easier to identify which tag is causing trouble, as most JSF error messages will display the id of the component (if we don't set it, JSF will assign one, that will be meaningless to us).

The <h:head> and <h:body> tags are drop-in replacements for HTML <head> and <body> tags.<h:form> is equivalent to the HTML <form> tag, notice that for JSF we don't need to specify the method and action attributes (method will always be “post” and the action will always point to the JSF servlet, which is automatically used when developing with JSF).

The <h:panelGrid> component lays out JSF tags on the page, similar to using a table to lay out HTML tags. Its column attribute specifies how many tags will be placed in each column.<h:outputLabel> renders an HTML <label> tag, its “for” attribute must match the id attribute of the input component the label is meant for.

<h:inputText> is equivalent to an HTML <input> tag with a type of “text”. A nice thing about JSF is that it automatically converts user-entered values to the appropriate type in the corresponding CDI named bean. The value of the value attribute is what is known as a value binding expression, we can recognize these since they are encapsulated in curly braces and preceded by a hash (i.e. #{..}). Value binding expressions are used to automatically populate the corresponding attribute in a CDI named bean with the user-entered value for the corresponding input text. Remember the @Named annotation? “person” inside each value attribute corresponds to the name of our Person bean. The value after the dot corresponds to the corresponding property in the Person bean. For example, #{person.firstName} corresponds to the firstName property of the Person bean.

<h:panelGroup> is used to group JSF tags together in a single cell. In our case, all we wanted to do was have an empty cell so that our button would vertically align with the rest of the input fields, so we placed an empty <h:panelGroup> tag at the appropriate location in our <h:panelGrid>.

Finally, <h:commandButton> submits our form, its value attribute sets the label for the button, its action attribute indicates which CDI named bean method to execute when the button is clicked (processData(), in our case). This is what is called a method binding expression. The method must be public, return a String and take no arguments. What we implemented here is what is referred to as dynamic navigation, although our simple example always returns the same String, there is nothing stopping us from returning different values depending on some conditions, we can then take the user to different pages depending on these conditions (picture a switch statement or if/then/else, with different return values for different conditions).If we don't need to do any processing after the user clicks the button and we always will display the same page, we can use static navigation, in which case the value of the action attribute can be hardcoded, like this:

<h:commandButton value=”Submit” action=”somepage”/>

We know that the value is hardcoded and not an expression since it is not surrounded by curly braces preceded by a pound sign (“#{...}”). In this case a page named somepage.xhtml would be rendered on the browser every time the user clicks on the button.The markup for our confirmation page simply displays the values the user entered on the previous page.

The only thing new on this page is the use of curly braces preceded by a dollar sign (“${...}”) to retrieve a named bean's properties. When the page is displayed the value of the corresponding property is displayed on the page.

Our application in action

Once we package our application in a WAR file and deploy it to our application server of choice (I'm using GlassFish), our input page will be rendered. Here is what it would look like after a user entered some data:Notice that we didn't have to specify any mappings in web.xml (as a matter of fact, web.xml is optional in modern JSF applications). By default, JSF pages are mapped to the /faces prefix.When the user clicks on the Submit button, the processData() method on our PersonController class is executed, which takes us to the confirmation screen.

What I left out

This post is meant as a quick introduction to JSF, so I obviously did not cover every JSF nook and cranny. There are lots of additional JSF tags that I didn't cover, there are JSF specific equivalents to every HTML input tag.

JSF also has input validation built-in, we can make fields required and also accept only specific formats, for example. For application specific cases, we can develop our own custom validators.

JSF has built-in data conversion, we saw this in action by adding a property of type short and having the user-entered value automatically converted to the appropriate type. JSF also allows us to develop custom data converters.

JSF also has Ajax integration built in, a topic that I obviously didn't cover.Finally, almost nobody develops “raw” JSF applications, the beauty of JSF is that allows the creation of component libraries. Most JSF applications employ one of these component libraries. Some of the most popular include PrimeFaces, RichFaces and IceFaces.

Where to go from here

After reading this short blog post, you should have a pretty good idea of the basic mechanics of JSF. To learn more about it, I'd be very grateful if you purchased one my books, Java EE 7 Development With GlassFish 4 or Java EE 6 Development With NetBeans, or, if you need personalized training, I can help you with that as well, just head over to my company web site: http://www.ensode.com for my contact information.Of course, there is a ton of free information on the web as well, now that you know the basics other tutorials out there that assume basic knowledge should make more sense, just use your favorite search engine to find out more.

The source code for the example shown in this post can be downloaded here.

This post is meant for managers, business analysts, recruiters, and anyone else who needs to interact with Java developers but is not a Java developer him/herself.Just like any other discipline, Java development is full with lingo that may be intimidating to those not in the field.

JavaJava itself is a programming language that is platform independent, which means that Java code can run unmodified on a variety of operating systems such as Windows, Linux/Unix, and Mac OS. Traditionally source code needs to be compiled for each specific platform, this is not the case for Java.

The Java Virtual MachineBut Java is not only a programming language, it is also a platform. Java code runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which translates Java bytecode (compiled Java code) into native code for each platform. There are several other languages that run in the JVM, such as JRuby, Clojure, Groovy, Ceylon and many others.

Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEAJava applications are typically developed using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the three most popular IDEs are Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA.

ANT, Maven, GradleJava applications also typically use a build tool to help compile, build and deploy applications, the three most popular build tools are ANT, Maven and Gradle.

Java EE, JEE, J2EEJava is extremely popular for developing enterprise server side applications, these types of applications typically use a web based user interface, with the business logic running on a server. Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) used to develop server side applications. Sometimes Java EE is referred to as JEE, however the officially sanctioned name is Java EE and the use of the term JEE is discouraged by Oracle, the company behind the Java platform (Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, the original company behind Java, back in 2010). Java EE was formerly known as J2EE, the J2EE term was so popular that it is still commonly used to refer to Java EE.

SpringThe Spring framework is an alternate set of APIs used to develop server side applications. In general, server side Java developers belong to either the Java EE or Spring camps, rare is the developer that is a fan of both.

GlassFish, Weblogic, Websphere, JBoss, Tomcat, etcServer side Java applications are deployed to an application server. Application servers provide functionality that is common to all enterprise applications so that application developers don't have to concern themselves with implementing this functionality. For example, application servers take care of transaction management, security and scalability. Some examples of application servers include GlassFish, JBoss, WildFly, Weblogic and Websphere. Tomcat can be thought of as an application server as well, however strictly speaking, it is a servlet container, that is, it provides less functionality out of the box than full fledged application servers. Java applications written using Spring typically don't require a full fledged application server and can be deployed to Tomcat. Another popular servlet container is Jetty.

JSF, Struts, GWT, EtcThere are several Java web frameworks that are used to ease and accelerate the development of web based applications. JavaServer Faces (JSF) is the standard Java EE framework for web development. There are several JSF component libraries that run on top of JSF, these libraries make it easy to develop nice looking JSF based web applications. Some examples of these libraries include PrimeFaces, RichFaces and IceFaces. In addition to JSF, there are several other Java web frameworks such as Struts (considered by many to be a legacy framework), the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Struts Web MVC and Wicket.

EJBOn the server side, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) provide transactions, security and scalability out of the box. This frees Java developer from having to implement this functionality and allows them to focus on implementing the business logic.

JPA, Hibernate, MyBatisThere are Java APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that help developers write code to interact with a database, the Java Persistence API (JPA) is the standard Java EE API used for this purpose. Hibernate and MyBatis (formerly known as iBatis) are two other popular libraries used for this purpose.

So there you have it, my friend, after reading this post you'll have some idea of what the heck those Java guys are talking about or what it is that is needed for that Java developer position your company is hiring for.

One common complaint that I hear from my clients and recruiter friends is that it is very hard to find good Java talent.

I am fortunate enough to be on the other side of the coin, I have been working with Java for several years now, I have authored several books on Java and have been a speaker at Oracle's JavaOne conference on more than one occasion, so I'd like to think I'm one of those hard to find good Java developers.

Being on the other side of the coin, I am bombarded every day with emails from recruiters interested in my services, I am fortunate enough to be able to be selective about the projects I work with. In my experience there are three things that drive me away from accepting a project. Here are my suggestions on things you can do to attract top Java talent.

Make it easy to apply

It is mind boggling to me the number of companies that require me to go fill out some long, convoluted form just so that I can apply for a job with them. I have several other companies that are dying to hire me, don't make it a hassle for me to apply for a job for you. On a similar note, many companies require me to fill out some form made in Word that duplicates all the information that already exists in my resume.

If you want me to work for you, don't make it a hassle for me to apply.

Be flexible with your tax terms

For quite a few years now, I've been an independent consultant, in order to do this, I had to incorporate, hire a payroll service, and get insurance for my business. I already have an infrastructure in place to run my business, therefore I only take Corp-to-Corp (C2C) contracts. A lot of companies do W2 only, or want a permanent employee only. Again, I have several potential clients that want to hire me and agree to my terms, your chances of hiring me are slim to none if you are unwilling or unable to do a C2C contract.

Your project has to be interesting

I'm not going to pull any punches here, a lot of the Java projects out there just suck, plain and simple. If what you want me to do is maintain an old J2EE application using Struts 1 and Spring 1 or 2, I'm not going to be very interested in your project. You need to modernize your infrastructure if you want to attract top Java talent. I have actually researched the topic on modernizing legacy server side Java web applications, and wrote a series of articles for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) a while back on the topic. The articles focus on Spring to Java EE migration, but the same concepts apply to J2EE to Java EE migration. If you need help modernizing a legacy project, drop me a note, this will certainly be an interesting project and I'll be happy to help.

One common criticism of my Spring to Java EE Migration article series (see part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4) is that the article uses an old version of Spring against a modern version of Java EE. There's a reason for that, since project using older versions of Spring are the most likely ones to be looking to migrate to a newer technology stack, be it a newer version of the Spring Framework, Java EE or something else.

Nevertheless, truth be told, I've been focusing on Java EE projects for the last few years, and the times I've used Spring have been when maintaining legacy applications that don't use modern versions of the Spring framework.

Trying to keep an open mind, I bought Just Spring by Madhusudhan Konda for my Kindle Fire. The book uses Spring 3.0, versus Spring 2.5 in my article series. I decided to go for this book since it is a quick read (just over 60 pages), I didn't want to have to go through a 300+ behemoth of a book just to see if my opinion of Spring was outdated.

Quite frankly, the book did little to change my opinion in the Java EE vs Spring debacle. Although annotations get a brief mention in Konda's book, most of the examples still use XML configuration, and the seemingly endless XML needed to do anything nontrivial in Spring is one of the main reasons I'm not a fan of the framework.

A while back, there were news all over the blogosphere about James
Gosling, father of Java, leaving Oracle shortly after the database giant
bought Sun Microsystems.

Gosling was unemployed for a while, but in March 2011, he went to work for Google. Today he published a new blog entry, announcing that he left Google to join a company called Liquid Robotics, a company that makes an unmanned ocean vehicle called the Wave Glider.

I'm
surprised that Mr. Gosling decided to leave Google after less than six
months of employment; nevertheless I wish him the best of luck in his
new endeavors. I'm sure Liquid Robotics will benefit greatly from the
positive public relations of having the father of Java join their
company, and I'm sure they are hoping his tenure will be longer than the
one he had at Google.

It seems like every other day a new article or blog post comes out declaring Java as a dead language. Every time I read one of these articles, I scratch my head in confusion. Are these people serious? If Java is so dead then why is there so much demand for it?

What does it mean for a language to be dead anyway? Is it that there is no demand for programmers with expertise in the language? If this is the case, then Java is definitely not dead since I routinely get emails out of the blue from companies looking for Java developers. I have been doing contract work since the late 1990's, and I move from one project to the next with ease, in most cases I have several offers before my current project is over. Therefore in this sense, Java is not dead.

Is a programming language dead if it's not evolving? If that's the case Java is certainly not dead. JDK 7 is just around the corner, and there are so many Java libraries out there, which release new versions periodically. Java is still very much evolving and improving, therefore in this sense Java is definitely not dead.

I can't think of any other reason why a programming language may be considered "dead", other than lack of demand for expertise or lack of evolution, therefore I'm pretty certain that Java is very much alive and well.

Perhaps the bloggers and reporters declaring Java's demise are actually doing us Java developers a favor, the less Java developers out there, the less competition for Java projects, which would in turn increase the demand (and billing rate) of us Java programmers. Keep stating that Java is dead folks, me, my colleagues (and our bank accounts) will thank you.